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The material upon which this paper is based consists of two dreams occurring in the analysis of an obsessional neurotic. I was about to leave Berlin to return to this country and had informed the patient to that effect on the day preceding the first of the two dreams. I had told him that I was going to leave in about ten days and that his analysis would be carried on by someone to whom the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute would assign his case. At this time he had been under analysis over a period of about ten months, but owing to interruptions caused by various trips I had been forced to make, he had had only about 180 hours or the equivalent of about seven months work.
He was in the early thirties, a stone mason, unmarried and had been at considerable sacrifice to obtain analytic treatment. He had removed from his home, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where he lived with his mother and a sister, and had come to Berlin and found work there in order to be analyzed. He had suffered for ten or eleven years with compulsive brooding and doubts. For instance, if he had been in a certain house once, he would, upon trying to recall its appearance, be unsure as to what it had looked like and would debate the subject with himself for hours, knowing all the while, however, that it was an utterly unimportant matter and of no real concern to him. This he had begun immediately after his return home at the end of the war. He had been drafted near the beginning of hostilities and had fought a few months on the Russian front when he was taken prisoner. He remained in internment until Russia's disappearance from the military picture and was soon fighting on the western front. He was again taken prisoner and was